Social Influence, Persuasion & Behavior Change

08 February 2024 08:44 Main Ideas Notes Notes Definitions Attitude: “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). ○ Attitudes can be held toward objects, people, or ideas. Persuasion: changing your atti...

08 February 2024 08:44 Main Ideas Notes Notes Definitions Attitude: “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour” (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). ○ Attitudes can be held toward objects, people, or ideas. Persuasion: changing your attitude. Make your evaluation of an object, person, or idea more favourable or unfavourable Persuasion may produce behavior change Why neuroscience to understand persuasion and behaviour change? Self-reported attitudes and behavioural intentions do not predict behaviour as strongly as one would hope Neuroscience approaches, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may capture psychological processes like persuasion outside of conscious awareness, without requiring introspection By studying the neural response to persuasive messages, we may arrive at better a theoretical model of the mechanisms of persuasion-induced behaviour change Which region(s) may be involved in persuasion-induced behaviour change? Neural valuation system (reward) May be an implicit system Ventromedial prefrontal cortex Striatum (including nucleus accumbens) Results ▪ Activity in the vmPFC when viewing the persuasive message positive correlated with behavior change (change in sunscreen use), controlling for changes in attitudes and intentions. ▪ Falk et al., 2011 - conceptual replication with smoking cessation persuasive appeals A community sample of smokers (n = 28) who were attempting to quit Smoking behaviour assessed via expired carbon monoxide at baseline and 1 month following exposure to professional smoking cessation ads Activity in the vmPFC when viewing smoking cessation persuasive appeals explained about 20% of the variance in smoking behaviour, above and beyond the self -report measures, such as intentions to quit ○ Self-report predicted the behaviour change to some extent Can neural activity in a "focus group" predict population-level behaviour? Traditionally, focus groups rely on self -reports (what do you think about the advertisements?) to determine the expected effectiveness of an advertisement. Falk et al., 2010 - Persuasive Message to Use Sunscreen Falk et al., 2012 - Neural Focus Group and Population-Level Behaviour 31 participants (15 female, 16 male) recruited from a quit -smoking program in the Los Angeles area. All were heavy smokers with a strong intention to quit. Participants were scanned with fMRI while viewing professional developed television advertisements designed to help smokers quit smoking. All ads had been selected and used in actual quit -smoking campaigns in different regions of the US outside of the Los Angeles area. Day 1 ○ ○ Filled out questionnaire that measured: ▪ Attitudes toward sunscreen use ▪ Intention to use sunscreen in the next week ▪ Behaviour: sunscreen use in the prior week ▪ Other distracter questions ○ Participants were scanned with fMRI ○ While in the fMRI scanner, participants viewed text and image -based persuasive slides from expert sources regarding sunscreen use ○ Again measured self-reported attitudes toward sunscreen and their intention to use sunscreen in the next week. ○ At the end of the fMRI session, given a thank you bag that included sunscreen towelettes. ○ No awareness that questions about sunscreen use will be asked later One week later ○ Email to participants in which they were asked to report the number of days they used sunscreen in the week following the fMRI session ○ Limitation is that the behavioural outcome measure was a self -report measure and may be susceptible to bias such as social desirability bias ○ But the researchers argue that they control for self -reported attitudes and behavioural intentions in their fMRI analyses. So any effect of the fMRI data predicting sunscreen use behavior cannot be explained by self -reported attitudes or behavioural intentions. Summary The brain’s subjective valuation system seems to be a key mechanism for persuasion-induced behaviour change, even when controlling for self-reported attitudes and behavioural intentions. This neural system predicts population-level outcomes, such as which ads are more effective in producing the desired behaviour. Oxytocin may increase pro-social behaviour towards other groups by increasing sensitivity to social information from one’s own group. Social influence interventions can produce persuasion and behavior change by directly influencing others but also because of indirect effects through social contagion. These social contagion effects may be particularly strong for close friends and/or when the person receiving the intervention is a social referent. PSYC0010 Social Psychology Page 1 Notes ○ fMRI results ▪ vmPFC tracked population -level behaviour, but self -reports of ad effectiveness did not ○ Key results Used a population measure of ad success Quitline call volume Compared volume on the Quitline in the one month before the advertisement aired to the one month after the advertisement aired. Drew these data from the media market in which the ads were run Controlled for factors such as media weight purchased (i.e., the size of the audience the ads were expected to reach). After the fMRI session, participants completed self -reports of ad effectiveness Vezich et al., 2017 follow up to sunscreen use study to examine message content (how versus why) and framing (gain versus loss) Key conclusions: ○ Message content: vmPFC showed a strong relationship to behaviour when the persuasive appeals focused on why but not how ○ Message framing: vmPFC showed a strong relationship to behaviour when the message focused on gain but not loss Summary The brain’s subjective valuation system seems to be a key mechanism for persuasion-induced behaviour change, even when controlling for self-reported attitudes and behavioural intentions. This neural system predicts population-level outcomes, such as which ads are more effective in producing the desired behaviour. Future directions The brain’s subjective valuation system is a key mechanism for persuasion-induced behaviour change. What increases activation in the neural valuation system during persuasive messages? Open question, but there are two key hypotheses that guide this work, based on some initial evidence (Falk & Scholz, 2017): ○ Self-relevance ○ Social relevance How can we inspire pro-social attitudes and behaviours towards other individuals and groups? Oxytocin Oxytocin is a neuropeptide hormone produced in the hypothalamus and released in the posterior pituitary gland. Oxytocin: Promotes and uterine contractions and milk let down for breastfeeding. Related to parental care in animal species Early work in humans Oxytocin increases trust (Kosfield et al., 2005) The media dubbed this hormone the “love” or “cuddle” hormone More recent hypothesis on oxytocin's role in social cognition Oxytocin may stimulate bonding only to one's in-group This theory has implications for attitude processes: ○ Oxytocin may stimulate positive attitudes and pro-social behaviours only towards in-group members (parochial altruism) ○ Oxytocin may increase in-group conformity ○ Both hypotheses have received some empirical support ○ Stereotype Content Model, Fiske, 2018 In these previous intergroup studies with oxytocin, the other group was either a neutral or competitor group ○ What if the other group member was portrayed as suffering/low status (refugees)? ○ Given oxytocin’s tendency to increase in-group conformity, could oxytocin lead people to adhere to social norms toward more altruism (what your peers donated), particularly for the most xenophobic individuals? Marsh et al., 2017 Experiments conducte Measured xenophobic Experimentally manipu ○ Intranasal oxytoc ○ Ingroup (German ○ Social norm infor Dependent Measure: M Results ○ Experiment 2: N ▪ Oxytocin in ○ Experiment 3: S ▪ Oxytocin co Interim summary The brain’s subjective self-reported attitudes This neural system pre Oxytocin may increase "Allure of neuroscience" b Fernandez-Duque et a ○ Mentioning neuro ○ Analytical thinkin Notes ed in Bonn, Germany, framed around Europe’s refugee crisis c attitudes (“Refugees have increased the tax burden on Germans.”) ulated: cin or placebo n) vs. Outgroup (Refugee) rmation (what peers donated vs. no information) Money donated in an altruistic donation task Notes Why social networks and social media to understand persuasion and behaviour change? Contagion in social networks. A message delivered to one person may influence attitudes and behaviours in other people via social contagion. Social network effects may matter more in the age of social media. Social media also makes some techniques more logistically feasible, such as personalized targeting of persuasive messages But there are ethical challenges How can we design interventions that leverage social networks and digital footprints on social media? Social influence interventions ○ Voting behaviour Do social norm messages spread in digital social networks to increase voting (Bond et al., 2012)? Methods ○ Sample size of approximately 61 million; US Election Day, 2010 ○ Randomized controlled trial: ▪ Information Message condition ▪ Social Message condition ▪ Control condition: No message at the top of Newsfeed ○ Dependent variables ▪ Clicking the “I Voted” button: political self-expression ▪ Clicking the polling place link: political information seeking ▪ Voting in the election: validated against public voting records in a sub-sample Results No social norm information ncreased donations only in those relatively low in xenophobia Social norm manipulation (what your peers donated vs. not) oupled with the social norm information increased donations in the most xenophobic individuals valuation system seems to be a key mechanism for persuasion-induced behaviour change, even when controlling for s and behavioural intentions. edicts population-level outcomes, such as which ads are more effective in producing the desired behaviour. e pro-social behaviour towards other groups by increasing sensitivity to social information from one’s own group. bias al., (2015) oscience in the argument makes participants perceive the argument as stronger, even if the argument is weak (circular). ng did not protect against this allure of neuroscience bias. What about indirect effects through social contagion? By impacting close friends in particular? Validation study showed that close friends in real life are more likely to interact more on Facebook. Next question: How does the treatment indirectly impact political behaviour of Facebook friends as a function of social closeness? Bond et al. - Indirect effects of the social message were stronger for close friends (strong ties) Results ○ A Facebook social message campaign increased voter turnout by an estimated 340,000 votes, representing 0.14% of the voting age population in 2010. ○ This excludes the impact on unmatched registered voters due to nicknames or typos. PSYC0010 Social Psychology Page 2 Notes Implications ○ Efforts to influence behaviour should pay close attention not only to the effect a message will have on those who receive it but also to the likelihood that the message and the behaviour it spurs will spread from person to person through the social network. ○ Contagion effects driven by close tries and may be explained in part by offline behaviours Do anti-conflict interventions spread in school social networks to decrease school-wide peer conflict (Paluck et al., 2019)? Might the intervention have a stronger effect on school -wide peer conflict when the person who receives the intervention is a ”social referent”, defined as someone who has a lot of connections in the social network (social attention) Methods ○ 56 schools in New Jersey US for a total of 24,191 students 11-15 yrs old; September 2012 to June 2013 ○ Examined each school’s social network (which students you chose to spend time with in the past few weeks) ○ Randomized half of schools to anti-conflict intervention or no intervention ○ Within schools assigned to the intervention, randomly selected “seed groups” of 20-32 students to receive the intervention ○ Dependent Measures in all students: ▪ Perceptions of conflict before and at the end of the school year ▪ School administrative records on peer-conflict disciplinary events Anti-conflict intervention ○ Targeted approach: Research assistant met with "seed groups" to identify school-specific conflict behaviors. ○ Public awareness and role models: Seed students became faces of the campaign, advocating against identified conflicts. ○ Multi-pronged approach: ▪ Slogan creation: Seed groups created hashtags and slogans reflecting the targeted behaviors. ▪ Visual reminders: Posters displayed slogans and photos of seed students, linking them to the message. ▪ Positive reinforcement: Seed students distributed orange wristbands as rewards for positive behaviour. ○ Outcomes: ▪ Over 2,500 positive behavior wristbands distributed. ▪ Presumably, the program aimed to reduce specific conflicts identified by the seed groups. Results ○ Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 25% over 1 year. ○ Effect of the treatment was strongest in schools where the seed group had more social referents (top 10% of nominations for that school). ○ Empirical results suggest that future interventions would do well to use as many social referents in their intervention group as possible ○ This treatment effect that was stronger in schools with more social referents in the seed group may be explained by greater communication about conflict Notes PSYC0010 Social Psychology Page 3 PSYC0010 Social Psychology Page 4